Freaking Out with Jesus in the Trees Community

The Universalist and Interfaith Roots of a Freak Folk Classic

​[Note this article wouldn’t have been possible without previous interviews done with members of the Tree Community by Klemen Breznikar at Psychedelic Baby Magazine, and an article by substacker Jason P. Woodbury at his Range and Basin. The quotes from the band come from these two articles.]

BIRTH OF THE FREAK

​Where have all the genuine freaks gone? There was a time in America when being called a freak was a badge of honor. When you got called a freak probably, it probably meant you had at least some connection to the counterculture, or were otherwise just too weird and into your own thing to care much about what the rest of society was doing or thought. The term freak is a kind of strange praise, and went back to the people who lived counter to the clockwise norms of straight society in the sideshows and carnival circuits where they were put, or put themselves, on display as a way to make a living. The hippies adopted the word freak and used it to show their allegiance to a way of being outside the normative values of the normies.

The word got its biggest boost from the “freak scene” that emerged out of hippiedom in Southern California, centered around the Laurel Canyon neighborhood in L.A and the clothing store of Suzanne  “Szou” Shaffer, who is credited with introducing hippie fashion. Szou was married to a man who had been on the east coast to Lithuanian immigrants, sent to a reformatory, did some time for various crimes, and joined the merchant marines during WWII before settling down to become a bohemian artist who gave classes in clay modeling to the bored housewives of Beverly Hills. Vito and Szou soon hooked up with a man named Carl Franzoni, who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1934. The trio started going around to a bunch of clubs in the area with other weirdos who stylized themselves as “freaks.” Miles Barry, in his book Hippie, notes of the scene that they “lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could.” No wonder Franzoni was given the nickname Captain Fuck.
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They liked to smoke marijuana and drop LSD. The group evolved into “an acid-drenched extended family of brain-damaged cohabitants.” Sometimes these psychedelic decadents called themselves “Acid Freaks.” California denizen and godfather of the weird, Frank Zappa, was inspired by these hippies. His mind was already out there enough to not need the help of drugs to stimulate his wackadoodle imagination. His debut Mothers of Invention album “Freak Out!” centered around Vito, Szou, and Captain Fuck. They and their cohort of freakers even appeared on the last track of the album. When it hit the record stores in 1966, Zappa and his Mothers helped to spread the freak gospel to a world hungry for something different.

Another terminal weirdo, Hunter S. Thompson, had got inspired by the burgeoning freakdom, and it wasn’t just with new ideas for his gonzo journalism, but to campaign for sheriff in Pitkin County, Colorado. It’s hard to believe it now, but it should be remembered just how many people in straight society hated the hippies, and how many were incarcerated over the years for selling and smoking marijuana. The incumbent sheriff Thompson was campaigning against was a man named Carrol Whitmire, a veteran hippie hater in Colorado who sought to stomp them out through methods of intimidation, jailing, and otherwise harassing the freaks, making it hard on them so they would leave the area. Hunter S. Thompson wanted to be sheriff instead. He created the “Freak Power” party and tried to get the hippies to vote him into office. The plan didn’t work, but the power of freakdom continued to spread. 

The term freak started to evolve at this point. The word started being used for any person with a very specific kind of obsession. “Health freaks” were one kind of nut and “control freaks” another. As the brain-damaged fall out from the drug addled excesses of hippie culture started to make themselves known, some people turned to a different kind of power, to recenter themselves and orient towards a higher power. That power, as often as not, was Jesus. 

Within the hippie and back-to-the-land movement there had always been a subset who believed in the power of Jesus. They tended to focus on the aspect of Christianity that revolved around ideas of universal love, pacifism, and the notion of Jesus as a radical freethinker overturning the rules of the establishment. These types ended up earning the moniker Jesus Freaks. Sometime it was used as a pejorative, but just as often it was embraced, because like any freak, they were really into Jesus.

​Some of those Jesus Freaks were very freaky indeed and have left behind cultural artifacts and a rich legacy that deserves to be remembered, and in certain aspects, emulated. The story of the Trees Community, famous for their recordings among devoted fans of “freak folk” music, is about one such group of Jesus Freaks and is worthy of contemplation by Christians, those of other faiths, and those who follow their own eclectic philosophy. 

EXPERIMENTAL SEEKERS OF ANCIENT WISDOM

Much of what became the Jesus Freaks started on the west coast within the evangelical end of Protestantism starting in the 1960s.  Intermixed with this were the hippies others for whom going to regular church didn’t hold much value. Some weren’t religious at all, and others had been exploring other traditions and religions from around the world. A lot of these people had opened the doors of perception with a bit of chemical assistance leading them to become seekers. When the acid started wearing off, many converted to Christianity, and set about trying to change their lives, often while still within the hippie milieu of communes, back-to-the-land living, and the idea that Jesus was a radical who came to overturn the tables of the system.

Yet not all of the freaks settled into a settled into the evangelical side of Christianity, with its focus on the born-again experience, preaching the gospel, and the desire to bring others to Jesus and “save” them using the toolkit of the charismatic movement. Other groups were called to express their faith in music, in monasticism, and in the life of a community organized around liturgy and ritual. The Trees Community followed this latter approach through their involvement with the Episcopal Church. 
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It all started with a hippie guru named Shipen, street name William Lebzelter, and his girlfriend Ariel. Shipen was part of the scene, man, a serious seeker, and perhaps even a seeker of Sirius. Shipen had collaborated on the crazy collage album Rock and Other Four Letter Words with J Marks, an album dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen that came out in 1968, after all. The liner notes read, “This album is dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen, who destroyed our ears so we could hear.” The album was based on a book by J that in turn featured photography by Linda Eastman who would soon take on the name McCartney when she married a Beatle named Paul. All roads lead back to the Beatles and Stockhausen, after all. 

The album was produced by John McClure and features a Moog II along with the tape cut-ups of the interviews done for the book mixed in with sounds and music from a large slew of contributors. The book and album both bear the influence of Marshall McLuhan. The book features fold out pages, large and small typography in a variety of fonts, alongside the images from photographer Linda Eastman, all jumbled up together as a kind of hyperlinked pop encyclopedia. The album aims to be an audio version of the same. Though the album didn’t sell many copies by record executive standards, it remains a document of the willingness of the freaks to engage with avantgarde experimentation. That one of the people involved in this album was Shipen who was the leader of the Trees Community is interesting in how it showcases the confluence of ideas within hippiedom.

Founding members of the Trees Community Katheryn “Shishonee” Krupa told their origin story in an interviewed by Klemen Breznikar for psychedelicbabymag.com. “The Trees Community started as a commune of individuals who were all drawn to a Loft in the East Village of New York City in 1970. I had met our ‘leader’ Shipen when he came to visit my boarding school in northern Michigan in 1969. I found his knowledge of yoga, Eastern religions and his personality fascinating! He had written his own ideas down in an ‘automatic’ writing (no edits or changes) called Clear Children. While at my school, a number of us like-minded students would sit beside Lake Michigan and talk about the seven chakras, or the many mindsets of Clear Children, among other ideas like: time is a construct or we need worldwide peace.”

Shipen extended an invitation to Shishonee for her to come visit the Loft in Manhattan where he had quite the scene going on. She visited first on her spring break, and came back to stay after she had graduated. The place was almost like an ashram with Shipen as it’s dynamic, creative and intelligent leader. Krupa said he “could have easily been a guru, or an L. Ron Hubbard-type person, but he wasn’t. He was not on a power trip and was pretty humble.”

Inside the loft their brick walls, the wooden floors had been painted white, and their were tents set up inside for privacy. Fabrics and drapes the color of wine were hung from the ceiling. Painted mandalas adorned the space along with a statue of the Buddha and a lions head carving. This was wear they dropped acid and held their happenings that involved poetry readings and free form improvised music amid the glow of kerosene lamps lighting the space with the natural flicker of their dancing flames. The improvised music sessions, which were according to Krupa “beautiful and quite intense,” would go on to create the foundation for the later liturgical music of The Trees Community. Many people from New York’s creative community of artists, musicians, actors and dancers came in to the Loft at Shipen’s invitation to participate in or witness the growing scene.

The basic hippie lifestyle of subsisting on beans, rice and homemade bread in a shared space was something that would continue.

In this setting the quest for secret knowledge and mystical wisdom played a central role. As Shishonee tells it, “Eventually, as we delved more deeply into religious study, those who started showing up were seekers eager for answers to life’s questions. We took day trips to listen to Alan Watts, Ravi Shankar, or attend Avantgarde theater productions. Evenings brought mystical adventures through spontaneous, free form musical exploration. One night might take us on a camel caravan along a desert road in Egypt. Another journey might take us on an ocean voyage on an ancient ship sailing on gently rolling waves under the moonlight. Visitors picked up instruments such as Balinese pot gongs, flutes, a sitar or Indian tambura or a heavy chain and played as the Spirit moved them. By mid-summer, the Loft became a place to delve into incredible spiritual realms. LSD was essential to these early magical experiences, as was an in-depth study of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, I Ching, Christian Science and early Christian mysticism.”

One of the people who stopped by to visit the loft in 1970 was the Reverend Rodney Kirk, a bishop at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. After this various hangers on at the Loft started going to mass. “We’d walk barefoot up to mass, then slip down into the labyrinth of echoing caverns underneath the main altar to sing spontaneously,” says Shishonee.
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In the same year Shipen converted to Christianity after a fall from a black willow tree. After he hit the ground he had a vision of Christ sitting at the right hand of God. Soon they were all being called to the Christian faith, and another figure from the Cathedral, James Parks Morton, had become their mentor as they embarked on a path of communal Christianity. West would soon become their Abbot after they took formal vows and set themselves up as a monastic community.

THE INTERFAITHFUL UNIVERSALIST

As the Jesus Freak movement continued to unfurl, some of the original ethos that had been inherent within its DNA from the anti-establishmentarian hippies started to fade, probably around the same time they were coming down from the haze of weed and acid. At the same time there was a Jesus Freak explosion due to the virality of media exposure in the early seventies. Bad trips and harrowing drug experiences probably also contributed to people seeking another way.

Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth became popular reading matter and a good portion of the believers shifted away from the idea of Jesus being primarily a prophet of universal love, healing and pacifism, and started to focus on a theology of dispensational premillennialism, or the idea of the immanent return of Jesus before the end of the world and the rapture of those who had been “saved.”  On the one hand this led believers to give up on some of the environmental ideals of the back-to-the-land movement. If the world was going to end, there wasn’t much point in focusing on trying to stop pollution or doing anything about the degradation being done to the land. What was needed was a focus on saving souls from eternal damnation. This in turn coupled with the dominionist view of biblical interpretation holding that God gave humans ultimate and total control over earth, and that it was the necessity of Christians to establish law and order across the land inside our political systems. Because the planet itself was temporary when compared to the kingdom of God and what was to come after the rapture, the resources here might as well be exploited as best befit the church going business executives.
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However, the dominionist and premillennialist theologies have never been the only theologies on offer. Ever since Mart Luther split the atom of Christianity, a process of theological diversification has been underway inside Christendom’s religious portfolio. The process started in Europe, but it accelerated in America, where all different manner of denominations nominated themselves as bearers of the truth. Most often, and to their own detriment, they often see their interpretation of cosmic reality as the “one true way,” but there have been those among them who have taken a different view of things and have proclaimed the idea that they are just “one way among many.” That specific theology has been called universalism.

In Christianity universalism can be described as the belief that all human beings will eventually be reconciled with God, that a loving deity would not condemn a soul to an infinite hell for the finite failings of momentary sin. In a more universal sense, universalism is the idea that universal truths exist beyond the specific sets of belief about spiritual matters within national, cultural and religious boundaries. I few accept that it is true that certain truths might be universal it sets the stage for acceptance and curiosity about the many different and diverse spiritual and religious traditions of the world, and the possibility of cooperation between. Universalist thinking has led to the growth of the interfaith movement.

It should be noted that universalist does not necessarily mean unitarian. Not all religions have to have the same end goal and destination in mind. Their very differences in practices and purpose are part of what adds to the beautiful mosaic and kaleidoscope of spiritual traditions.  

It is not the purpose of this article to get into the history of the universalist movement within Christianity, that had its origins with radical freethinker, minister, theologian and proto-Anarchist Gerard Winstanley in the 1600s with the diggers, or to trace the origins of the interfaith and ecumenical movements. But by the time Shipen, Shishonee, David Lynch (not that David Lynch) and the other hangers on at The Loft came around, universalism and the interfaith movement had found strong adherents within the Episcopal Church. That influence left its mark on the character of what became The Trees Community and made their music and philosophy a different color than the Jesus Freaks who were gearing up for the immanent destruction of earth, the rapture, and the return of Christ.

The interfaith and universalist approach suited The Trees. They had already been explorers in the world’s diverse traditions, from Hinduism and yoga, to Kabbalah and the early Christian mysticism of the Desert Fathers. They were intrepid psychedelic explores, and even as they came down from the drug trip following their conversion, knew intuitively that the inner realms of spirit had a lot less need for rule bound adherence to specific doctrines of theology than the humans who liked to make those rules. They were led along the path to an orthodox faith and sharing of spiritual experience through music, art and liturgy, without concerning themselves as much with the questing to save other people’s souls, which has been a typical focus of Christianity.

This tendency towards Christian universalism was nurtured by their spiritual advisors from the St. John the Divine Cathedral. It was Canon Edward Nason West, the subdean of the Cathedral, who became their spiritual advisor, and when they took formal vows, he became the Abbot of what they called The Trees Community. Canon West also happened to be the advisor to noted fantasy writer Madeline L’engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time, among many other wonderful novels. The group became very close with her as well. In a four of her books, West appears as the character Canon John Tallis. As they moved along in their journey with the church, West became their spiritual “father” and L’Engle became their spiritual “mother.”  
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West was canon sacrist and subdean. He was also a theologian, author, iconographer, and an expert in the design of church furnishings. He had a deep love for Fyodor Dostoevsky and was equally versed in Eastern Orthodox side of faith as he was to the Episcopal traditions within the overarching Anglican Communion. He liked to see himself as a starets, or what is known in Eastern Orthodoxy as a kind of spiritual guru. These weren’t people necessarily of high rank with the church, but known as wise and the person people went to for advice.

L’engle was also of the persuasion of the universalist salvation. She believed that “All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones.”

George MacDonald had a large influence on her work and she believed in a similar way as he did with regards to divine punishment. “I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love.”

Her universalism was such that many Christian bookstores didn’t want to carry her books, because the doctrine is considered heretical by some. The evangelicals likewise banned her books from being taught in their schools, let alone carried in the libraries. One such critic stated that “Madeline L'Engle teaches universalism in her books and denigrates organised Christianity and promotes an occultic world view.”

It wasn’t the only way she was getting criticized though, the secular readers and critics thought she brought too much of her faith and spirituality into her books for them to be comfortable with either.   

The Trees Community worked closely with the priest James Parks Morton at St. John the Divine. He had grown up in Iowa, but studied theology at Cambridge, England, followed by his ordination into the episcopalian priesthood. Morton went on to become a leader in the interfaith movement. In Jersey City and Chicago, he worked with the inner-city poor. His work brought him to NYC and in 1972 he was appointed dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Upper Manhattan. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. At the time it sat in the middle of an area of urban stagnation, and working with Bishop Paul Moore, they transformed the place into an inclusive bohemian temple.

Morton was sympathetic to the environmental movement and wanted to maintain dialogue with other religions. Later in his career he founded the Interfaith Center of New York.

​Morton was interested in using the arts as a way to bridge the energy of religion, and made the Cathedral a kind of hot spot for dance and music in the already flourishing NYC scene. As such he was the perfect kind of mentor to give spiritual guidance to the members of the Trees and their community work.

IMPROVISED WORLD MUSIC

After the core group of seekers at The Loft had started converting to Christianity, the other, more casual visitors stopped dropping by. Those who remained were committed to living a life centered on Christ. The idea of taking a hippie commune and turning it into a devoted monastic community held a strong hold over them, but West advised them that they should take things a bit slower and go out and see what other denominations within Christianity had to offer before they committed and made formal vows.

This was fortuitous timing in another way. The Loft where they had their genesis was eventually transformed into a parking lot by the municipal powers of Manhattan. With the scene around that particular crash pad dissipating, and West advising them to look to other churches, they decided to take their improvised music, now incorporating the psalms of David, prayers and religious lyrics, onto the road.

As Shishonee recalls, “Eleven of us set off in May, 1971, disciples of the Lord, eager to see where He would lead us. For the next seven years, we traveled throughout America and Canada, honing our musical, theatrical presentation and sharing it in schools, churches, monasteries and Christian communities. Always, we sought God’s will. He drew us to help pick strawberries and work with Hutterites on a farm in Ontario. He led us to a monastery in Gethsemane, Kentucky where we found a spiritual retreat with gracious, Franciscan monks. He called us to live with nuns and monks in a Roman Catholic monastery along the Pecos River in New Mexico. We helped pack pecans in a community in Koinania, Georgia, then lived and worked in a family household at Church of the Redeemer in Houston. Each experience in a new community brought change, conflict, and growth, pruning members away from our core group, or sometimes adding to it. Throughout these painful often difficult experiences, the music flourished and evolved.”

Their music had been informed by their wide ranging interests. It could be said to mirror the interfaithful example of their universalist teachers. Sitars, zither, harp, cello, koto, gongs, Balinese instruments and African hand drums all joined together in a symphony of souls. They continued to improvise, even while using the structure of the psalms and other material as a focus. The influence of world music can be thought of as their exploration of different religious traditions, while their dedication to improvisation, something not as common at all in other Christian music, can be seen as an expression of the individual freedom of the adherent.
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When came back to New York City form their initial travels and eventually did take their vows. An article in Time Magazine from 1973 reports on their experience that “The five men and three women, ranging in age from 20 to 30, went through a virtual catalogue of religious experiences before undergoing their Christian conversions. Now known as the Trees Group, they live in an apartment near the church, regularly give concerts at the cathedral and also perform tasks like guiding cathedral visitors. This fall they will take preliminary vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.”

As they honed their music, they continued to tour and give concerts at churches and in other spaces around the United States. In 1975 they recorded their sole/soul album The Christ Tree.
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‘The Christ Tree’ was compiled as a musical meditation – our concert – that we performed in late 1974 and early 1975 while on tour. The concerts were not just a “show” but rather was a form of worship, a musical journey for those who came to experience it. For the album, we left out a few songs that were in the full concert, yet still it is representative of what we were playing at that time,” Shishonee said. “ The Christ Tree was not just a concert, but also a theatrical event, designed to draw people into a life-changing experience. Imagine the dramatic impact of hearing strangely discordant, far off voices singing “Holy, Holy” (called ‘Holy Seed’ on the album) approaching from distant corners of a dimly lit church, then seeing nine men and women wearing flowing white robes and swinging incense as they move slowly through the audience…”

Yet he life of the monastic bohemian started to take its toll, and the group was starting to disband by the late seventies. The experiment was over in 1978. The vows of chastity were hard to maintain, and people partnered up and started having families. They loved what they had done, but it was getting harder to maintain. Harder in the financial sense as well, with money for the arts drying up at the church and New York City where they were based deep into its years of abasement. The Trees had grown from a seed, flourished and spread its roots and branches, then shed its leaves.

The original pressing of the album became legendary among aficinados of strange ethereal music for its combination of weird folk and world sounds coupled with its earnest and deep spirituality. The vinyl commanded high prices in the collectors market. Then in 2004 Timothy Renner of Dark Holler Arts remastered the album for release on CD. It was rereleased again by Old Bear Records in 2020, fifty years after The Trees Community had first formed at Shipen’s Loft.

The entire album is worth listening to on repeat, but it is their versions of Psalm 42 and Psalm 45 that I keep coming back to over and over again, year after year.

The music remains timeless, ancient sounding, experimental and utterly contemporary. My hope is that new musical and spiritual seekers who find the music will continue to be inspired by their example, by the freedom to improvise within a spiritual context, by the freedom to choose instruments from around the world and combine them eclectically.

It seems clear that people in the United States and Europe are leaving behind the trappings of secularity in favor of a return to religion, what historian Oswald Spengler called a second religiosity. People are finding safety in religion from the collapse and decline of the institutions and systems previous thought to be stable. Many young people are flocking to both evangelical denominations and seeking out the Traditionalist movement within the Roman Catholic Church or joining various Eastern Orthodox churches. Teachers like Canon West, Madeline L’Engle, and James Parks Morton, and their disciples in the Trees show that matters of the spirit and can be viewed from a universalist lens, and that faith can be celebratory of differences in religion within and beyond Chrisitanity. Hopefully too, they will allow themselves to get their freak on.  
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